By Jillian Schranz
Happy New Year! The Event 360 team is back in action after some downtime to rest and recharge over the break. And with the new year comes a whole new season of 100+ events.
Here are some things we’re looking forward to this year:
Celebrating fundraisers. The team at OneCause recently released The 2023 Fundraising Outlook: Insights for Nonprofit Planning & Prioritization in which they predict that “in-person events will make a strong showing in 2023.” We say, cheers to that! Their annual survey found that the anticipated mix of event strategies across the non-profits polled shows that 83% of respondents plan to leverage in-person events. This is obviously great news for us, a company that has spent the past 20 years partnering with non-profit organizations to bring live fundraising events to life, but even more so, it’s great news for fundraisers. The magic of peer-to-peer fundraising events happens when participants and teams who have worked tirelessly to raise funds for a cause near and dear to them get to come together and celebrate with their community. We’re looking forward to bigger and better communities of fundraisers in 2023.
New team members! Last year, we experienced rapid growth, going from 50 events on our roster pre-pandemic to 105 events in our first full year back to live events. This meant we needed to expand our team of event professionals and luckily, we had a great network of folks to step up and join us full-time. New team members bring new ideas, new insights, and best of all, new energy. Just like many non-profits that have experienced turnover or new staff, we’ve spent the last couple of months flexing our “new hire training” muscles.
A year of refinement: A trend I’ve seen recently is foregoing the traditional new year’s resolution for a single “word of the year” to guide your personal or professional life. If Event 360 had a word of the year for 2023, it would be refine: to improve by making small changes, in particular, to make an idea, method, or theory more subtle and accurate. Last year was all about growth, and in 2023, we’ll be refining our processes, our operations, and our execution as we focus on taking a season of triple-digit events and further improving upon 2022. Do we ever just sit back and rest on our laurels you might ask? Not this team. Mostly, we’re excited to replace the ever-tired word “pivot” with something less frenetic. We can pivot with the best of them, but we’re hoping 2023 is full of precedented times.
We hope this 7-minute read left you inspired and ready to face the new year. Whether you’re eager to focus on delighting and surprising your teams and fundraisers on-event, or your organization is onboarding some new faces, we’re here to help or simply cheer you on. What’s your word for the year?
Jillian Schranz
Jillian has worn many hats at Event 360 in the past 16 years — from fundraising coach to project manager, to event IT support. She knows our work and our team inside and out. In her current role as Director of Business Development, she can perfectly partner our clients with the services they need and ensure our team delivers flawless event experiences that yield happy participants and stellar results.
